Starting soon, people will be able to download apps for their personal robots just like they download apps for their iPhone or iPad.
robots
World’s First Stretchy Electric Cable, More Lifelike Robots to Follow
Imagine: Your vacuum cleaner’s power cable isn’t long enough to reach out the front door, across your driveway and into your car’s backseat. What do you do? Buy an extension cable, of course! Or if you had one of Japan-based …
10 Robots Inspired by Animals and Insects
All the research in the world can’t beat millions of years of evolution. Today’s roboticists are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration, creating robots that move and behave with uncanny similarity to living animals. …
Giant Robot Snake Meets Walking Mechanical Spider
Titanoboa meets Mondo Spider! It sounds like the premise for a bad B-movie, but no, it’s all terrifyingly real, thanks to the artists and designers over at eatART.
In one corner, Titanoboa, the 35-foot electro-mechanic snake that uses its 20 aluminum vertebrae to crawl just like its flesh and blood cousins. In the other, Mondo Spider, …
How Honda’s ASIMO Became the Running, Drink-Serving, Autonomous Robot It Is Today
In 1986, Honda developed a robot that could barely move its legs. Last week, it revealed one of the most advanced robots in the world.
How Foxconn’s Million-Machine ‘Robot Kingdom’ Will Change the Face of Manufacturing
Foxconn, pressured by the stresses of rising labor costs and negative media attention over employee suicides, could be reshaping the landscape of manufacturing forever. How?
According to Focus Taiwan, the company recently …
New Robot from ‘BigDog’ Makers Moves Eerily Like a Human
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Yes, those geniuses over at Boston Dynamics have finally done it: created something even creepier than their last robot, BigDog. The Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin (a.k.a. PETMAN) is finally reporting for duty after a 13-month design phase and 17-month build phase.
The man-sized robot …
Goodbye, Career: Machines Can Now Write Like Journalists
They can already play soccer and beat us at Jeopardy—I just didn’t think this day would come so soon.
Narrative Sciences, a start-up in Evanston, Illinois, has developed a sophisticated program that can write articles—typically sports summaries—in under 60 seconds according to the New York Times. Previous iterations of the …
Two Bickering Chatbots Video: Artificial Intelligence Gone Awry
More like artificial fun-telligence, am I right? Eggheads have been working for years—years!—to perfect chatbots to the point that real people won’t be able to tell that they’re actually conversing with software, not other humans.
The technology has come a long way, but what happens when you pair two chatbots together to converse …
WATCH: Flying Robotic Camera System Given to Libyan Rebels
Aeryon Labs of Waterloo, Canada has revealed that it’s given one of its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Libyan rebels to help them collect intelligence from afar.
The “Aeryon Scout Micro UAV” weighs just three pounds and can be packed into a suitcase or backpack. The system is controlled via a simple touchscreen map interface, …
Foxconn: Your Next iPad May Be Assembled by a Robot
Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing contractor that often produces Apple’s newfangled iDevices, has decided that they’re going to up the ante, slowly replacing factory workers with robots.
Within the next three years, Foxconn plans to include 1 million robots in its workforce while phasing out some of its human workers. Currently, …
Robot Apocalypse News of the Week: Machines That ‘Dream’
Most of the robots we’re vaguely familiar with are good at menial tasks, like welding car parts or assembling microchips. But that isn’t to say that what they do isn’t difficult: Those tasks require ultra-precise data to be programmed beforehand. And though there are practical applications for spatially aware technology–like the …